Paris is always a good idea. ~Audrey Hepburn

H1N1 Over Estimated? According to CBS, YES

I'm a little on pins and needles one moment when I hear about H1N1 mostly because I have two children that fall into the higher risk category and I already experienced a nasty cold turn into pneumonia due to some medical mistakes whereas my youngest nearly died last November and was intubated for well over a week. So when I hear all these pandemic reports, it puts fear into me and I try to tell myself that it's partly due to misinformation and an overhyped media. Now I'm reading it's been categorized as a national emergency so my government is overhyping it perhaps.

According to a new study by CBS:

A three-month-long investigation by CBS News, released earlier this week that included state-by-state test results, revealed some very different facts. The CBS study found that H1N1 flu cases are NOT as prevalent as feared. A CBS article even states:"If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn't have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn't have flu at all."Obviously CBS News and the CDC are completely contradicting each other. So who is right?Well, CBS reports that in late July 2009 the CDC advised states to STOP testing for H1N1 flu, and they also stopped counting individual cases.Their rationale for this, according to CBS News, was that it was a waste of resources to test for H1N1 flu because it was already confirmed as an epidemic.So just like that virtually every person who visited their physician with flu-like symptoms since late July was assumed to have H1N1, with no testing necessary because, after all, there's an epidemic.

It's interesting to note that at the same time as the CDC decided the H1N1 epidemic warranted no further testing for cases due to its epidemic status, Finnish health authorities actually downgraded the threat of swine flu.

In late July the health ministry and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Finland actually removed swine flu from a list of diseases considered dangerous to the public because the majority of cases recovered without medication or hospital care!

And, as the CDC continues to use fear to motivate and control Americans with their worst-case swine flu scenarios, they say nothing of the experience of those in the southern hemisphere, which just finished their flu season and found it was not as bad as expected.

I also just read a poll on another news outlet that shows that most Americans believe it's mostly hyped. Tonight, Mike Huckabee is even talking about it on his show.